Bob Dylan and Bubba Gump

Add Bob Dylan to the list of counterculture heroes who want nothing to do with the counterculture.

“My favourite politician,” he reveals in his autobiography, Chronicles, “was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.” (p. 283). He had originally wanted to join the military and go to West Point (p. 41). His vote for the best US President ever goes to Teddy Roosevelt (p. 40). His original musical model was Hank Williams (p. 49). “Polka dances always got my blood pumping,” he notes (p. 93).

He recalls his views in the early seventies: “Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it. I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had bee anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion.” p. 120.